Bit by bit, a determination that could be mistaken for courage returned.
Gingerly, she made her way across to the tangled strands, aware that she might be treading on the corpses of hastily buried women. A book she’d read came unbidden into her mind,
Something was coming, an engine, tiny and distant. Humming down through the bottle’s neck was a comforting burr of sound, a small-engine aircraft, one of the little ones that took sightseers on flights over the lake. The sound grew louder. The little plane was close to the ground, close to Anna. Tilting her head back, she squinted at the impossibly blue eye above. The neck of her jar was canted like the slightly twisted dual necks on the old vinegar-and-oil carafe her mother kept on the kitchen counter. The carafe was for show. The only salad dressing they ate was homemade Thousand Island: ketchup, mayonnaise, and sweet pickle relish.
“Down here!” she yelled. “Help me! I’m down here!”
They were looking for her. They had to be. Over her lieu days Jenny probably thought she’d hitched a ride on a boat headed for Wahweap to spend time in town. By now her lieu days must be over. She’d been in the pit at least a night and a day and a night, thirty-six hours. If her weekend wasn’t over now, it would be tomorrow. Without a watch, without knowing how long she had slept or what day it was, time got tricky. Knowing the time kept people from going adrift.
When she didn’t show up for work—whenever that was, today, tomorrow—when she didn’t show up on her “Monday,” Jenny would raise the alarm and the Park Service would come find her. Search and rescue. The rangers were big on that. Visitors, fools like her, were always getting lost, falling into holes, being eaten by wolves, that sort of thing.
Rangers and EMTs. Law enforcement rangers had to be EMTs; she remembered that from the information the NPS sent after she’d gotten the job. They had to take courses every year. Search-and-rescue rangers would search for her and rescue her; EMT rangers would give her aspirin for her head, maybe Valium for her shoulder.
The airplane, it was them.
“Down here!” she yelled again. “Help me!” The plane droned louder. “Down here, goddammit! Help, help!” The engine whined overhead. “Down here, you stupid fucks!” she screamed, leaping to her feet. The plane murmured away. Anna fell to her knees.
The bottom of the jar, down here where the bodies were buried, wasn’t visible from airplanes. Nobody would be peeking into the hundreds of holes. First, they’d think of the water. Lake Powell was so deep, in the main channel there was no dragging the bottom. Deep meant cold and dark. Bodies didn’t always float up. In the cold and dark, they sank. The rescuers and EMTs, did they think she had gone down to the world of the dead, joined the army of the drowned? Had they stopped looking? Or never started?
She wished she’d told somebody where she was going. Jenny might remember their conversation about the trail out of Dangling Rope.
Not bloody likely. Jenny was all about the fecal materials.
God damn stupid fucking green-and-gray Smokey Bears. Rangers. Telling John Q. Public not to litter and to be sure and hold hands with your buddy on the scary paths.
“Fuck!” she yelled. What she wouldn’t give to have the NYPD looking for her, real cops with guns, batons, Mace, handcuffs, bad attitudes, and ambulances that whisked the injured to big shiny hospitals where doctors —“Doctors who’ve actually gone to medical school,” she ranted at the eye—fixed injured arms and broken heads.
Shouting at the fragment of empty sky, Anna realized the jar wasn’t as deep as she’d first believed. The way the neck curved and narrowed created a false perspective. The opening wasn’t more than twenty feet from where she stood, smooth vertical walls rising for fifteen feet or so, then a steep slope from that to the eye.
Twenty or two hundred, there was no way to climb out.
“I screwed up,” Anna croaked, her throat raw and dry from shouting. Her head was aching again and her arm throbbing. “I hoped.”
Getting into the solution hole would be easy. A strong person could easily climb down a twenty-foot rope. All he’d have to do was tie it to a big rock and drop it into the throat of the jar. When he left, he could just pull it up after him, no muss no fuss. Unless he drove or walked in from the miles of bleak and rocky desert she’d seen to the north, he’d have to climb up from the lake. That would be hard, harder than the short hop out of this hole. The monster had to be strong.
Strong enough to carry her down into the hole? Maybe not. Her shoulder and head suggested he’d just tossed her over the lip to survive the fall or not.
That was annoying. He wasn’t even sure she was a high enough grade of garbage to be monster meat.
“Bite me, you prick!” she yelled at the eye. “I hope you choke to death on my bones.”
He would be strong. Strong and young. Movies insisted serial killers were twenty to thirty years old. Anna hoped they were right and he was young; it limited the number of dead people with whom she might be sharing space.
Though the lake was only a small part of Glen Canyon Recreation Area, nobody much hiked. There were a couple of trails used by backpackers, one down from the Navajo Reservation to Rainbow Bridge and another somewhere uplake. A trail led into Bullfrog, but it was long and came from nowhere to dead-end at the lake’s edge.
People didn’t hike along the shoreline. Lake Powell didn’t have shores, not like a real lake. Powell lived in canyon bottoms, cliffs rising vertically two hundred, six hundred, as much as a thousand feet in some places. From what she’d seen of the plateau, there weren’t any roads.
Other than on the water, or the few small beaches carved out from the sandstone, there wasn’t anywhere to be. Anything farther from the lake than a man could throw a beer can was dry rock and hot dirt, wilderness.
Half a mile as the crow flies from this burial pit, boaters were catching fish, children were splashing in the shallows, and girls in bikinis were flirting with boys in cutoffs. A half mile and a half million light-years.
At least that’s what it felt like to anybody but lunatics and coyotes, Anna thought sourly. She would not screw up again. Like praying to a nonexistent god, it was demoralizing to hope for help when none was coming.
No, Anna wouldn’t hope.
Turning, she studied her jar looking for anything new, anything she hadn’t noticed before—besides the nest of human hair under the sand. Silent walls swirled upward; smooth, beautiful in their way—a perfect palette for an artist.
A perfect lair for a monster; utter privacy within commuting distance of home.
Where was a monster when he was at home?
Houseboats, even those moored in the marinas year-round, were allowed only two weeks on the water. It kept homesteaders from living on the lake full-time. Was the monster a boater who used his two weeks a year to pursue his hobby?
That would work, Anna thought. That would be ideal. Spend two weeks on a houseboat—time enough for a bit of sport—kick sand over the remains, then go home to Oregon or New Hampshire or North Dakota, tanned and rested, plenty of holiday memories to enjoy over the winter, show one’s pals slides of the vacation.
Anna swayed, her mind wanting to shut her down in a faint. The possibility that a picture of her misery might live on after she had been murdered to pleasure her killer over and over again was unbearable, worse somehow than death, torture, or rape. To be used after one was dead shouldn’t matter. Dead was dead, gone, beyond all pain.
Except it wasn’t, not when one was alive to think about it.
“No pictures,” Anna shouted. “No fucking pictures!”
For a heartbeat she felt the earth around her as a comfort, clean and honest, a cloak against eyes and lenses. Shaking her head, intentionally eking out the remaining pain from her injury, Anna pushed photographs of her degradation from her reality.
The monster.
Anna had to understand the monster so, like Scheherazade, she could continue to live for a thousand and one nights. Better yet, so she could find his Achilles’ heel and escape. Did he brown-bag it, bring his own prey? No.
